North of the big bang

“My exercise every morning is to try and pour cold water on my fantasies.” Don’t worry, Massimo Giovannini is not thinking of anything salacious. He’s a physicist at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland, and Giovannini’s flights of fancy concern the gigantic and mysterious magnetic fields that stretch through space.

Giovannini has good reason to fantasise&colon; these cosmic magnetic fields, sometimes big enough to stretch across clusters of galaxies, are one of the last unexplored features of the universe, and could hone our theories about how the universe came to its present state. That’s because there is a tantalising possibility that today’s fields are the legacy of those created mere instants after the big bang. The information contained in these magnetic fields could tell us how the universe developed from the big bang into the vast cosmos around us. “Primordial magnetic fields could ...

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